The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood

Canadian writer Margaret Atwood may be most familiar to religious audiences for her 1986 novel The Handmaid's Tale, which satirizes the religious hypocrisy of the right, the political pretensions of the left and the dangerous complacency of the vast uncommitted middle. Earlier, in Surfacing (1992), Atwood had explored the spiritual vacancy of contemporary culture through the eyes of a woman whose resources for renewal consist of a peculiar bricolage of Protestant dogma, Catholic ritual, scientific rationalism and fragments of Native American myth--none of which helps her through her spiritual crisis. In the typical Atwood text a bewildered, cynical female narrator senses the horror of her own spiritual emptiness and tries to alter her condition by telling her story.